Monthly Archives: July 2021

by JAY COST

The Biden Administration has made infrastructure spending a top priority of its first-year agenda, and prospects seem surprisingly good for a bipartisan deal. It actually seems possible, even in this age of hyperpolarization, that the two sides might come together on some kind of agreement. But what sort of package should Republican lawmakers accept? While both sides generally support infrastructure spending, they have strikingly different reasons for doing so. And Republicans should insist on a package that facilitate the partys top priority of economic development.

The GOPs commitment to infrastructure spending goes back to the very origins of the party. The Lincolnian Republicans were at first a hodgepodge collection of disparate groups opposed to the spread of slavery, but the dominant force within that early coalition was the remnant of northern Whigs. A cornerstone of Whig policy was spending on what they often called internal improvements, which the party viewed as essential to regional integration and economic development. In the 19th century, it was the Republicans who spearheaded federal support of railroad development, including the transcontinental railroad. In the 20th century, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower initiated the Interstate Highway System. Though the GOP has evolved a great deal since its beginnings, infrastructure has remained a Republican priority because the party still stands for those 19th century ideas of promoting private sector development and linking disparate parts of the country together.

The Democratic path toward support for infrastructure was markedly different. Generally opposed to such programs prior to the Civil War, in their Jacksonian belief that the Constitution prohibited them, the party only embraced it in the 20th century as part of its reorientation toward an expansive vision of the central state. Franklin Roosevelts New Deal enacted massive expenditures on infrastructure, but then again it enacted massive expenditures on virtually every imaginable policy program. Importantly, Democratic motivation for infrastructure spending was (and is) different than the GOPs. While the party has historically touted infrastructure spending to promote economic development, the social welfare aspect is at least as important. The New Deal was not simply about building roads and buildings and clearing forests, it was about putting unemployed men to work to accomplish those tasks.

The difference in party motives remains to this day and is evident on several specific political debates. A good example is the continued divide over the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, which mandated that projects on public works that receive federal funds must pay workers the local prevailing wage. Democrats, spurred on by their allies in the construction unions, strongly favor the act, while Republicans generally believe it should be repealed. The former see it as a form of redistributive public policy while the latter see it as interfering with the efficiency of federal spending.

An even more substantial point of division between the two parties is how to pay for such programs. Because Democrats view infrastructure spending in part as a way to transfer wealth from the rich to the poor, they have no problem raising taxes to finance such projects. But because most Republicans primarily see infrastructure as a means to economic development, they see tax increases as a self-defeating form of financing, as it takes capital out of the private sector, where it is best directed for growth. Instead, Republicans usually prefer to finance infrastructure through spending cuts, which are anathema to the Democratic agenda.

So as an issue, infrastructure is one where the devil is most definitely in the details. There seems in general to be common ground between the two sides, but philosophically the parties have notably different reasons for supporting increased spending.

If anything, the divide between the parties has only grown greater in the last few years, as the Democrats have moved substantially to the left. Moderate Democrats are fewer and farther between, while socialist Bernie Sanders is the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, an important perch from which to influence domestic policy. Many in the party now seek to redefine infrastructure as a catchall term for their entire agenda. The expansion of a cradle-to-grave welfare state, from new programs on childcare to an expansion of Medicare, is now human infrastructure. The Green New Deal, with its massive transfer of wealth based on magical notions of a carbon-free economy, is likewise now infrastructure. And buried deep within the Biden Administrations infrastructure plan are all kinds of goodies for labor unions and restrictions on what policies states who accept federal dollars can actually accomplish. Destroying federalism is apparently now infrastructure in the Democratic mind.

As bipartisan negotiations over an infrastructure package continue this summer, Republicans should be mindful of their bottom line as a coalition. Any bill that hopes to have Republican support has to focus on physical infrastructure that facilitates regional integration and above all economic development. That is why the party supports such spending, and it should be its sine qua non in any negotiations. If Democrats insist on redefining the term infrastructure to include their redistributive agenda, Republicans should walk away from the bargaining table and instead take the issue to the voters in 2022.

Jay Cost is the Gerald R. Ford nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he focuses on elections, politics, and public opinion.

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If Everything is Infrastructure, Common Ground will be Hard to Find - The Ripon Society

Enormous human betterment has occurred since The Enlightenment, chiefly because crusading liberals overcame conservative resistance, time after time.

Modern democracy arose because Americas radical founders renounced the divine right of kings and took up arms against England and George III. They created government of the people, with no aristocracy.

Slavery ended because radical abolitionists hammered the entrenched institution until the horrible Civil War wiped it out.

Following the new knowledge given to humankind by Gandhi, many more gains in human rights started to be made with nonviolent struggle instead of war.

Women gained the right to vote because radical suffragettes fought for decades against their inferior status.

Couples gained the right to birth control because radical feminists especially Margaret Sanger battled against prudes and the church.

Workers gained the right to organize unions because President Franklin Roosevelts New Deal defeated corporate opposition and legalized it. And retirees gained Social Security pensions because the progressive New Deal created the safety net program.

Jobless people gained unemployment compensation and those injured on the job gained workers compensation because the New Deal created them too. Additionally, it set the 40-hour work week, banned child labor, and set a minimum wage.

The poor gained welfare protection from the liberal New Deal also.

Censorship of sexy books, magazines and movies was wiped out by progressive court cases. So were bluenose laws forcing stores to close on the Sabbath.

The historic civil rights movement and the progressive Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren struck down Americas cruel Jim Crow segregation. The Warren court also ended government-led prayer in schools. It wiped out state laws against birth control. Later liberal justices gave women and girls a right to choose to end pregnancies.

Taboos against lotteries, liquor clubs and other sins fell away.

Strides toward universal health care as a human right for everyone included Medicare, Medicaid, Childrens Health Insurance, Veterans care, government employees coverage, and finally Obamacare.

Conservatives tried to prevent teaching of evolution in public schools, but they failed.

Conservatives tried to teach creation in public schools, but they failed.

Conservatives tried to block sex education in public schools, but they failed.

Puritanical right-wingers made racial intermarriage a crime, but the liberal Warren court legalized it.

Puritanical right-wingers jailed gay lovers, but progressives on the high court forced the government to get its nose out of the bedroom.

Fundamentalists fought same-sex marriage, but Democratic state legislatures and, ultimately, the Supreme Court legalized it.

Humanism means helping people, and secular means doing it without supernatural religion. Decade after decade, century after century, leftist reformers defeated conservatives to advance secular humanism. At the same time, churches and their magical beliefs faded enormously from western democracies.

More recently, international warfare has virtually disappeared.

Pioneer Unitarian minister Theodore Parker said the arc of history bends toward justice and Martin Luther King Jr., who spent years as a young man attending a Unitarian church, adopted the phrase masterfully.

The past shows a clear pattern of human progress of civilization bending toward justice. Lets hope it continues.

James Haught, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is editor emeritus of West Virginias largest newspaper, The Charleston Gazette-Mail, and author of 12 books.

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Conservatives have always looked to stop social progress - theday.com

Virginia Military Institute cadets march during the inaugural parade of President George W. Bush in 2005.(Tim Shaffer/Reuters)

What started as an effort to address allegations of racism and inequality has spiraled into a cultural assault on a venerable institutions heritage.

In our age of cultural revisionism, can an institution with a distinctive military history at odds with prevailing progressive narratives and norms about identity reform itself without completely renouncing its heritage? The recent and ongoing assault on the Virginia Military Institute illustrates that Orwellian historical obfuscation and submission to the application of critical theory as a governing principle are the inevitable consequences of these absurd and arbitrary political imperatives. The results are anything but tolerant, equitable, or inclusive.

It would be hard to conclude otherwise from the final report the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) released last month of its investigation into the culture, policies, practices, and traditions of VMI following allegations of systemic racism at the school. The Roanoke Times first reported some of the allegations last June, which emerged as African-American alumni shared accounts of racism at the school over social media. Others circulated petitions to remove a statue of former VMI professor and Confederate General Stonewall Jackson from its prominent position in front of the schools barracks, and to deemphasize other elements of the schools distinctive heritage and symbolism. The outcry came amid the broader cultural upheaval and invigorated attention to racial injustice in America that followed the killing of George Floyd in police custody.

VMIs then-superintendent, retired U.S. Army general J. H. Binford Peay III, responded to the allegations, first in a letter on June 4 and then in another on July 29, which included a five-pillar action plan to address at least some alumni concerns. The plan announced that the school would deemphasize the prominence of Jacksons statue by recentering its flagpoles to abut a statue of VMI graduate George C. Marshall, while also removing ceremonial tributes to the schools involvement in the Civil War Battle of New Market in May 1864. But it was not until October, however, after Ian Shapira detailed a harrowing selection of the allegations in one of what would become a series of articles for the Washington Post, that Virginias Democratic political leadership in the Executive Mansion and the General Assembly took notice and issued a scathing letter of their own on October 19, accusing the Institute of a clear and appalling culture of ongoing structural racism and demanding an independent, third-party review of VMIs culture, policies, practices, and equity in disciplinary procedures.

The president of VMIs Board of Visitors responded the following day, welcoming an objective, independent review of VMIs culture and the Institutes handling of allegations of racism and/or discrimination and pledging the full cooperation of VMI officials in the review. Yet only two days after the reply, before any such investigation could begin, Virginia governor and VMI graduate Ralph Northam conveyed that the states political leadership had lost confidence in General Peays ability to lead a transformation necessary to address the allegations, spurring Peays resignation on Monday, October 26.

That Thursday, October 29, the Board of Visitors voted to remove the statue of Jackson, reversing its previous position, while also establishing a permanent diversity and inclusion committee, now the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee, and a building and naming committee, now the Commemorations and Memorials Naming and Review Committee.

* * *

What began early last summer as a movement against systemic inequalities in Americas criminal-justice system the disproportionate mass incarceration and police killing of African Americans morphed quickly into a broader upheaval concerning itself with allegations of systemic racism and oppression in a nation that has still not healed the wounds of slavery over 150 years after Emancipation. The protests, in turn, redirected their attention from specific and legitimate policy problems to the destruction and removal of monuments and memorials to dead Caucasian men, especially those affiliated with the Confederacy.

The relationship between Confederate symbols and institutional racism against black Americans traces its roots to the political failures of postwar Reconstruction which coincided with the beginning of Americas failure to successfully integrate freed slaves into society as citizens. The Ku Klux Klan, established by former Confederates, adopted the Confederate battle flag as a symbol of terror, segregation, and white supremacy in the lawless post-war South. An emblem that was once a soldiers flag a banner of honor for veterans and their friends who fought and died in a war that was, for many, not of their choosing became a symbol of racial oppression.

All of this injustice the enduring systemic inequalities in our country, including in policing traces its roots to the evils of slavery. But the American Civil War did not cause slavery; it ended it. And whatever the opinions of its participants and its casualties North or South may have been on the matter, a faithful understanding of history requires us to acknowledge that their involvement in that war was far more complicated than contemporary conversations acknowledge. We benefit from the hindsight of being able to examine in toto the history they lived and created in each moment but suffer from our tendency to compress, categorize, and oversimplify as that history recedes away from us in time.

The Civil War began at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. Virginia did not pass its Ordinance of Secession until April 17 (a previous proposal failed on April 4), after President Lincoln called for states to provide troops to suppress the rebellion on April 15. For Virginia, threats to the preservation or continued expansion of slavery proved insufficient causes for secession or war. The threat of invasion of its neighboring states and the request to furnish troops for that purpose, however, were unacceptable affronts to their concept of sovereignty. Slavery, though undeniably a cause of the first wave of secession across the Deep South in December 1860, nonetheless did not become a central issue of the fighting for Union forces until after the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. As National Reviews Dan McLaughlin has noted, the Union mostly fought to preserve the nation against secession, and only a minority of its members (especially at the outset) saw the war as an anti-slavery crusade. People today might be surprised to learn that Delaware, Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland did not secede, but nonetheless maintained slavery and remained in the Union.

History is often more complicated than what we are able to capture in a sentence.

* * *

Central to the complaints, political turmoil, and relentless media scrutiny that VMI endured over the past year was the statue of Jackson, sculpted and donated to the school in 1912 by a VMI graduate and veteran of the Battle of New Market, Moses Ezekiel. This points to the broader source of controversy: The schools association with (and institutionalized tributes to) individuals affiliated with the Confederacy or, more specifically, affiliated with the Institute prior to 1865. We may understand the decision of the Institute to honor and revere its erstwhile professor so prominently as an homage to his character and his prowess as a military officer (which earned him international renown) as well as a branding decision. Honoring the legacy and affiliation of a military man with the reputation of Jackson, though he was a poor professor, was distinctively appropriate for a Southern military school.

Similarly, and more poignantly, the honors paid to the cadets who fought and died at the Battle of New Market on May 15, 1864, are fitting and proper: not because they fought for the Confederacy a fact incidental to their action but because they responded to the call of duty with a selfless sense of sacrifice to defend their native state, making VMI the only school in American history to fight and suffer casualties as a student body in battle. Their foe, General Franz Sigel, was the first commander of an Army dispatched by General Ulysses S. Grant to wage total war against Virginia in the Shenandoah Valley through the destruction of food supplies, crops, and farmland upon which the Confederacy relied to feed its soldiers.

These points, of course, should not diminish the legitimacy or gravity of the allegations of racism voiced by African-American alumni and cadets last year (or at any time): The experiences they detailed are, indeed, unacceptable for any institution in the 21st century. They warrant investigation and remediation. Unfortunately, these legitimate complaints have received only shallow and fleeting attention, even in the investigation, as instruments of political theater.

The complaints, too, that VMI has too long emphasized its distinctive history from the Civil War era at the expense of acknowledging the more recent significant contributions and accomplishments of its graduates including men such as George C. Marshall, Jonathan Daniels, or General Darren McDew also bear due consideration. Venerations of Stonewall Jackson and the Battle of New Market no longer offer the appeal they did a century ago. The school does and should stand for more than its contributions to the defense of its native state during the Civil War.

But there is something troubling in the response that VMIs Board of Visitors has adopted. Rather than seeking to better understand and convey the significance of Jackson or New Market and why they remain worthy of continued respect, not as trifles of Confederate apologia, but as distinctive elements of the Institutes history the school instead chose to allow its critics to misrepresent them as artifacts of hate.

We have seen the same treatment worse, in fact of Confederate monuments and memorials across the American South in recent years. There endures an unsettled debate over whether some were erected as markers of racism and segregation. But we must recognize that at least some of the monuments exist as due tributes erected to the memory of a war, its casualties, and its veterans, that shaped the collective memory of a country for over a century, in the wake of utter destruction, loss, and trauma. The men and women who erected these memorials friends, families understood the collective memory of the experience as something worthy of commemoration: not in hate, but in reverence. May they not also mourn their dead? The commandment to honor thy mother and father is one we may all recognize, even if we are not religious.

Monuments to men such as Lee or Jackson and especially and even more so, monuments to ordinary soldiers, such as the Howitzer Monument or the Soldiers and Sailors Monument removed from their pedestals in Richmond, Va., last summer are tributes to neither slavery nor racial oppression, but to dead men who answered what they understood to be an obligation of duty to their native state. We would do well to recall that soldiers dont start wars; civilians do. And civilians decide what happens when they are over. Soldiers merely endure, fight, die, or, if they are fortunate, live to remember their lost friends. Horrifyingly, they have become political pawns through which politicians may claim cheap victories in response to unrest over legitimate social grievances like what we witnessed last summer. It is much easier to remove a statue of a dead man than to provide a policy solution to racial injustices that deprive living men and women of their rights to life, liberty, security of person, and dignity. A monument to a dead soldier does not assault another mans dignity, but a mischaracterization of its meaning is an insult to both.

* * *

One million dollars and seven months later, the SCHEV investigation of VMI and its final report, conducted and produced by law firm Barnes and Thornburg, produced no new facts that previous reporting had not already offered. The executive summary merely recapitulates in more formal terms what we have already heard from Virginias Democratic leadership and Shapiras salvos in the Washington Post: that VMI does not live up to progressive expectations of diversity, equity, and inclusion as informed by principles of critical theory and intersectionality. It is a school too dominated by white men. But failure to match arbitrary diversity targets does not illustrate a clear and appalling culture of ongoing structural racism.

The body of the report reviews the stories we have seen elsewhere and perhaps unearths a few more, pairing them with statistics as paltry evidence of the Institutes insufficient diversity. Among the skewed statistics is one that claims that VMI does not match the racial and ethnic composition of the surrounding general populations: VMI had a higher percentage of Caucasian cadets relative to the composition of the surrounding population and the Commonwealth, except compared to Lexington (Appendix D, page 11). But the surrounding population the authors appear to offer as an example (at least in their chart) is the city of Lynchburg, located on the other side of Amherst County well beyond Rockbridge County and Lexington and with a population ten times greater. Geography and research methods are, of course, not among the subjects covered in law school or on the bar exam.

This raises a question that appears to remain unanswered: What are the objectives of diversity and equity in this context? What targets of ethnic and racial composition and outcomes should a rural state school such as VMI reflect? And how do those objectives relate to the distinctive history of a place?

Diversity in the 21st century is a valuable if not essential objective for organizational success especially because we live in increasingly globalized and pluralistic societies. But efforts to cultivate diversity should also preserve and curate respect for the unique history and culture of a place. VMI is and long has been a distinctive institution because of its unique place in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and its history as our nations oldest state-supported military college. To erase or recast that history because we have misrepresented it is to indulge in an irresponsible act of cultural destruction. Efforts to create diversity and cultural sensitivity training that the report recommends should bear this in mind. Apparently, no one reminded Barnes and Thornburg to be mindful of its own likely unconscious biases about what should constitute diversity and the distinction between urban and rural contexts.

What the report is interested in, of course, is not so much inclusion as diversity of racial identity and equity which, of course, concerns itself not with equality of opportunity but equality of outcomes. Indeed, as noted in a Wall Street Journal editorial earlier this year, the government cant measure equality of opportunity, but it can measure equality of result. If the results are not equal, they assume unequal opportunity. This cuts to the heart of the investigation and the report, which is, put bluntly, an exercise in counting things especially survey-response percentages and the composition of populations by markers of racial and ethnic identity. For bureaucrats, diversity only runs skin deep.

The report also gives extensive attention to the perspectives of the 385 interviewees, noting that perceptions were as important as facts in establishing an understanding of racial intolerance at VMI. How one reconciles perceived slights and wrongdoings with actual ones is a question the report does not attempt to answer. The report also gives extensive attention to the perspectives of the 385 interviewees, noting that perceptions were as important as facts in establishing an understanding of racial intolerance at VMI. How one reconciles perceived slights and wrongdoings with actual ones is a question the report does not attempt to answer. But this reflects the increasing prioritization of feelings over rational engagement with facts and aversions to potentially offensive ideas and emotional harm in American academia. Another trend in academia reduction to binary moral thinking that understands the universe and each individual as easily classifiable into simple categories of good or evil also overshadows the events of the pastyear.

But to set aside the other faults of a report submitted to justify its own existence, one of its primary recommendations bears consideration here: specifically, that the Institute should temper associations between VMI and the Civil War and Confederacy. The Institute is well on its way to doing this, but as previously suggested, it is ineffective and distracts from real problems of racial inequality. The report, in its own stumbling manner, illustrates why this is the case:

Among Caucasian current cadets who participated in the survey, 59% rated the extent to which the statue of Stonewall Jackson promotes racial intolerance and/or discrimination as none . . . By comparison, among African American current cadets who participated in the survey, 25% rated the extent to which the statue of Stonewall Jackson promotes racial intolerance and/or discrimination as none, 25% rated the extent as a little, and 50% rated the extent as a lot (384).

Clearly, there exists a perception among African-American cadets that a statue of Stonewall Jackson promotes racial intolerance. For reasons outlined above, we may understand why this perception prevails. But it is apparently lost on the authors of the report, who take the claim for granted. Ezekiels statue of Jackson does not promote racial intolerance in its spirit of reverence for his military service or its design; only the incorrect interpretations others have ascribed or attributed to it do. This, of course, is a problem of misattribution that looms over calls to remove many statues erected to honor historical figures not because their statues represent racial oppression, but because we have superimposed that interpretation over the original intent of their artists and patrons. But if one believes that all soldiers associated with the Confederacy or even all Caucasian men of historical prominence are inherently evil and unworthy of reverence by even their families with due consideration for the constraints of their historical context, there are more insidious claims behind such a mentality that demand our reconsideration.

On May 3, the Board of Visitors, at the recommendation of the Commemorations and Memorials Naming and Review Committee, voted to make another round of changes, mostly removing or deemphasizing Jacksons name from prominent buildings on Post, including the main entrance to the Barracks and the schools chapel (Jackson Memorial Hall). Among the changes, however, was an announcement that the statue of Virginia Mourning Her Dead, also sculpted by Ezekiel, would be reinterpreted to honor all former cadets who have died in wars and military conflicts since 1839.

The change is well-intentioned but flawed for multiple reasons. First, VMI already has a Memorial Garden dedicated to this purpose. Second, the stated purpose of the statue by its sculptor was to specifically commemorate the loss of his friends who died in the battle who were, notably, not former cadets but current cadets at the time of their deaths. Perhaps an expanded significance does not diminish and even enhances the original intent of the artist. Strangely, however, an inventory of artifacts on Post with ties to the Confederacy produced months before the Boards decision already indicated this broader purpose.

At a meeting earlier this year, the Naming Committee prepared an Inventory and Review of Monuments and Memorials Related to Confederate Iconography. Perhaps the most troubling fact about this list is the appearance of a statue of George Washington, which predated the Civil War with no other acknowledgement for its significance relative to the other memorials identified. George Washington, of course, was a prominent Virginia planter who freed his slaves upon his death, the commander of the Continental Army during the American Revolution, and the first president of our United States. His appearance on this list leaves us to wonder: what are the limits of the current episode of political theater, what do they conceal, and do they feature any serious consideration of the facts of history?

One year later, what have we accomplished? The Institute and its faculty, administrators, cadets, alumni, and parents, no doubt wish to get on with their lives as Virginia and the United States emerge from the restrictions of the pandemic. The turmoil of the past year will fade into memory as the bread and circuses of ordinary life return to divert us. VMI has found itself a capable leader in alumnus Major General Cedric Wins. The legacy of the investigation and the consequences of the premature political censure that preceded it will linger as the school strives to reconcile its mission to prepare citizen-soldiers for lives of public service through bonds of uniformity and camaraderie with the political imperatives of identity, diversity, and equity in numbers at all costs even the cost of truth, cultural distinctiveness, tolerance, and real inclusion.

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An Equity Audit Wants the Virginia Military Institute to Renounce Its History - National Review

The next high-profile elections arent until next year. And when the first few fellows from a brand-new voting group called the New Pennsylvania Project started knocking on doors in places like Norristown or lower Bucks County this summer, they werent pushing a candidate merely asking unregistered or infrequent voters whats on their mind. No wonder executive director Kadida Kenner says the main reaction so far has been surprise.

We can talk about [federal COVID-19] funding not being used [by Pennsylvania], or economic justice and raising the minimum wage, or education justice and the large spending gaps between schools, Kenner said of the groups early door-knocking efforts. These are the ideas and issues that engage low-participation voters, or those who have not registered to engage in the political process. We have to overcome all these barriers to entice certain folks to go out and register.

Only in existence since early May, the for-now Harrisburg-based New Pennsylvania Project if the name sounds familiar, its a riff on the wildly successful New Georgia Project launched by Stacey Abrams in the 2010s is on the cutting edge of whats emerging as the Democrats main strategy for 2022 and beyond to fight GOP intransigence on voting rights and outright suppression laws enacted in some Republican-controlled states.

The Republican plan for the next batch of elections hinges heavily on a blueprint of making it more difficult for people, but especially young voters and Black and brown folks, to cast ballots rolling back mail-in voting that flourished in the 2020 pandemic or making it harder, eliminating drop boxes, or curtailing early voting hours. The Democratic response inspired by the Georgia success of Abrams and other voting advocates behind shock victories there for President Biden and two Democratic Senate candidates is to get more Black and brown and young voters jacked up about elections, then get them to the polls despite these obstacles.

Youre not asking them for a vote thats really important, Kenner said of the method. What she means is that the New Pennsylvania Project aims to have door-knockers working in underserved communities year round, with a more issues-oriented approach, as opposed to traditional method of a politician showing up a few weeks before Election Day.

Kenner, whod been director of campaigns for the left-leaning Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center, said the new effort came together amid the frustration of among top Democrats about the 2020 election results, when statewide success for Biden didnt translate into gains in legislative races, and the party endured surprising defeats for state treasurer and auditor general. Not surprisingly, Kenner and the ideas chief backers including the former auditor general, Eugene DePasquale, as well as Bucks County donor and defeated 2018 congressional candidate Scott Wallace and Karl Hausker, husband of failed 2016 Senate hopeful Katie McGinty looked south to the Peach State for inspiration.

After Republicans gained total power over Georgia politics in the Tea Party era and enacted some of the nations most regressive voting restrictions, amid large-scale purges of voter rolls, Abrams then a Democratic legislative leader hatched a plan for fighting back. Founded in 2013, her New Georgia Project went door-to-door talking about that states failure to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. The idea was that many people dont need to be sold on the Democratic Party or a specific candidate, but the more fundamental case that voting even makes a difference.

Progress from the New Georgia Project, a second group later founded by Abrams, called Fair Fight Georgia, and a wave of related efforts mostly led by Black women was slow at first, but the drives signed up 200,000 new voters in 2018 (when Abrams ran for governor and fell just short) and a whopping 800,000 in 2020-21, when Biden became the first Democrat to win the states electoral votes since 1992 and January run-off wins by Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock gave the party control of the U.S. Senate. One of Kenners first acts in leading the New Pennsylvania Project was to travel to Atlanta and meet with Abrams lieutenants, to learn what she called the secret sauce.

In Pennsylvania, Democrats have held a registration edge, but in 2020 Republicans closed their deficit from 800,000 to just 600,000 voters partly because of Donald Trumps ability to woo working-class former Democrats, and partly because the GOP didnt suspend its door-to-door efforts as Democrats did in the worst of the pandemic. Kenner believes the key to reversing the statewide trends can be found in some key urban and suburb areas greater Pittsburgh and Harrisburg, northeastern Pennsylvania, parts of Bucks County and urbanized Philadelphia suburbs like Norristown or Chester and among under-40 voters, especially non-whites.

Kenner said one of her first challenges is selling some big-ticket donors on the New Pennsylvania Projects unconventional mission. Were asking that you give it to a group thats not going to knock on your door with a D or an R on its chest, she said. Theyre going to knock on the door and talk about issues there people care about, and organically these folks will understand and vote their values, and realize they need to come out in every election, twice a year here in the commonwealth, and become super voters.

READ MORE: How Georgias women of color beat voter suppression and saved democracy | Will Bunch

Earlier this month, Vice President Kamala Harris announced from the White House a similar, $25 million voter registration effort backed by the Democratic National Committee.. Veteran Democratic strategist Ed Kilgore described in a New York magazine piece as part of a fallback strategy for voting rights because two major pieces of federal legislation to thwart Republican voter-suppression efforts are blocked by a GOP Senate filibuster.

The situation is paralleled in Harrisburg, where hopes of building on 2020s pandemic changes that led to a modern record for Pennsylvania turnout have been thwarted by gridlock between Republican lawmakers who want new restrictions and the veto power of Democratic Gov. Wolf. Without new voting rights laws, turnout-boosting schemes like the New Pennsylvania Project might not only be the Democrats best shot, but its only path.

In the Keystone State, this effort is led by an activist, in Kenner, with the zeal of a late-life convert. A Pittsburgh native who was raised in suburban West Chester and after a successful career as a retail manager went back to Temple for a mid-life degree in journalism and a new life in Charlotte producing sports telecasts, Kenner was thrown a curveball in 2016. Struggling to find work as college sports boycotted North Carolina over its anti-transgender bathroom bill, she took a job with Hillary Clintons presidential campaign. But Clintons defeat and the arrival of Trump convinced her that political change was now her calling.

Kenner, 46, also feels the quest for equity is in her blood. Her great-grandfather, M.L. Clay, was freed from slavery to become one of most prominent African-American businessmen in Memphis at the turn of the 20th century a bank vice president and industrialist who associated with the likes of Ida B. Wells and Booker T. Washington only to be gunned down on Beale Street over his wealth. Her modern hero is Bayard Rustin, who was also raised in West Chester and went on to organize the massive 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Kenner has a large poster with Rustins image and his words, The proof that one truly believes is in action that she carries around Pennsylvania. He literally travels with me, she said. Hes currently in the back seat of my car so wherever I go he can go with me.

She marvels that Rustin organized the 1963 march where Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his I Have a Dream speech without email, without Facebook, without social media, and he got 500,000 people to the Mall, and to know he had to do that behind the scenes because they kept him literally in the closet as a gay man. Fifty-eight years later, Kenner will have to combine those modern tools with old-school organizing to put up similar numbers in the voting booth, in an era when increasingly its the fate of democracy itself thats on the ballot.

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Is the Stacey Abrams method the only hope for saving democracy in Pa.? | Will Bunch - The Philadelphia Inquirer